Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare across Time and Media

Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare across Time and MediaDiana E Henderson, Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare across Time and Media, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. Pp. xi + 289. ISBN 978-0801444197.To write about subject matters that straddle several centuries, disciplines and genres, is, by any measure, a bold move, even in a post-disciplinary age. One also has to make the argument pertinent to readers on the far side of the fence who may be otherwise unfamiliar or uninterested in it. Such are the challenges facing any scholar working on Shakespeare's long and unpredictable afterlife. Diana Henderson's Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare across Time and Media reshapes our understanding of Shakespeare's afterlife. The book makes the case for the notion of writers' and artists' collaboration with Shakespeare. In her lucid analysis of this process of collaboration which Henderson calls "Shake-shifting as a means of self-authorization," Shakespeare's plays are likened to a kaleidoscope that modern artists shake up, after which Shakespeare's "glassy essence" is cut to bits to help create "newly evocative patterns" (2), allowing us to also "pick and choose our Shakespeares" (36). Of special interest to readers of this journal are the thought-provoking Introduction and Chapters 3 and 4.Henderson's study of theatrical, cinematic and literary adaptations deftly carves a space for new ways to think about how Shakespeare's plays survived and evolved through time and media. At the heart of the Introduction and the book lies the concept of collaboration. Henderson finds such terms as adaptation and appropriation are limited in their capacity to explain the phenomenon. Therefore, she develops "Shake-shifting" and collaboration as notions that emphasize interpersonal interaction and reworking of Shakespeare in various forms. As demonstrated throughout the book, the notion of collaboration, while not new in textual scholarship, takes the discussion of Shakespeare's afterlife to a different level by attending to "the connections among individuals, allowing artists credit and responsibility, but at the same time refusing to separate them from their social location and the work of others" (8). These critical possibilities are usefully juxtaposed with a candid assessment of Henderson's own collaboration with or contentions against other critics' theories (such as Herald Bloom's Anxiety of Influence, Joseph Roach's theory of "the enactment of cultural memory by substitution" and "surrogation" among different generations, and Jay Bolter and Richard Grasin's Remediation).1The first part of the book (Chapters 1 and 2) focuses on "novel transformations" of Othello by Sir Walter Scott (Kenilworth, 1821) and Cymbeline by Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dcdloway, 1925) and Charlotte Bronte (Jane Eyre). The second part (Chapters 3 and 4), draws upon modem stage and screen adaptations of The Taming of a Shrew and Henry V to explore works that appear to aspire to "nothing more (or less) than a seeming translation to the new medium - even when in fact they drastically altered both story and theme" (25) and films that provide rich opportunities for a reassessment of scholarship on both Henry V and its diachronic collaboration in the twentieth century (205-06).Chapter 3, "The Return of the Shrew: New Media, Old Stories, and Shakespearean Comedy," invites the readers to "apprehend why this so-dated text can still provide a strangely modem experience" (201), and Henderson carefully points out that the appeal is distinct from a "timeless" experience. …